Reflections, commentaries, critiques and ideas from 40 years experience in the fields of Community Development, Community Education and Social Justice. Useful tools and techniques that I have learnt also added occassionally.

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The name of this blog, Rainbow Juice, is intentional.The rainbow signifies unity from diversity. It is holistic. The arch suggests the idea of looking at the over-arching concepts: the big picture. To create a rainbow requires air, fire (the sun) and water (raindrops) and us to see it from the earth.Juice suggests an extract; hence rainbow juice is extracting the elements from the rainbow, translating them and making them accessible to us. Juice also refreshes us and here it symbolises our nutritional quest for understanding, compassion and enlightenment.

Tuesday, 4 October 2016

Time to Question the Machine

Source: polyp.org.uk

The economic growth machine has been chugging along for a century or two
now. Following World War II it shifted up a gear and went global. Now, it’s
speeding along on the course designed by it’s makers. Many of us are on board
enjoying the ride.

Many thousands more do not have enough to buy a ticket, whilst some have been
thrown off the machine by the conductors. Yet, the machine keeps whistling
along the path that the captains of business and their political lieutenants are
keen on having us travel.

Meanwhile, on board we enjoy the ride because it offers us the baubles of
success, fame, luxury and leisure. We happily consume these. They occupy our
time so that we don’t have to look out the front of the machine to see where we
are going. If we did, we might take fright, for on the horizon there is a
gaping chasm into which the machine is bound to tumble if we continue in that
direction.

What is it that is powering this machine? Our consumerism. Our affluence.
Our greed. Although most of us would not recognise, let alone acknowledge, that
it is our greed that fuels this juggernaut. We have been manipulated. The
captains of industry and their marketing sergeants have prodded at our fears and
greed, and at our hopes and desires with a message that says “if you buy then
you will gain happiness.”

Indeed, they have been quite blatant about this. Not long after the end of
the second world war Victor Lebow (a corporate director, co-chair of the
Economics of Distribution at Columbia University, and a writer) was declaring
that,1

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our
way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we
seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The
measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found
in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives
today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the
individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he
tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears,
drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his
hobbies.”

In order to make this happen, Lebow exhorted his corporate colleagues that,

They have been doing it ever since, getting better and better at it. More
and more cunning and devious. This century the marketers have managed to shift
consumption beyond that of social status and meaning. In the past decade or two
they have managed to imbue consumption with our self identity.

They’ve got us. We are now trapped. We go out and buy in order to build our
sense of self, to find our identity in a corporate logo worn by our favourite
pop singer or sports star. Then within days (or sometimes even hours) we become
dissatisfied. There is no self-hood in what we have just bought. We stop using
it, we throw it away. Then what do we do? Go and buy something else to fill
the void in our lives – exactly as Lebow and his colleagues would have us do.

All of this continual buying, discarding, consuming, buying more, discarding
more is fuelling that runaway machine.

It’s time that we, the passengers, began to question the machine. We need to
question not just the direction, but the machine itself. We need to also
question the fuel – our own sense of who we are. If we do that, we might just
find that by opting off the machine we find the satisfaction that we really
desire. We may find that our self identity and our satisfaction is found in
quietly and simply wandering in the vast earthly realm, well away from the
consumerist machine.

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About Me

I have almost 40 years experience working (paid and unpaid, government and non-government) in community development/education and social justice fields. I have continued to keep myself abreast of philosophies and theories in these and related fields. This blogsite will offer ideas, thoughts, reflections on these fields as well as giving some tools and techniques. I don't pretend that these will be original but I do hope that they will be able to translate some of these diverse ideas into coherent forms accessible to workers in the areas.